Диана Дуэйн - How Lovely Are Thy Branches

“Yup.”

“You’re a terror!”

“Not as much as him. Hi Matt!”

“Gonzo boy! Have some ice cream.”

“How long can you stay?” Nita said.

“Until I fall asleep,” Darryl said, tucking himself down among the cushions. “I go back to being one of me then.”

“No rush about that,” Matt said, handing him a bowl of ice cream. “If you eat this too fast, which of you gets the brain freeze?”

“Let’s find out!”

A few more minutes were spent assembling popcorn and more drinks, and turning down unneeded lights, and getting everybody comfortable. Finally Dairine looked over her shoulder, “Everybody ready? And Darr, if this gets too loud for you say the word.”

“If this gets too loud for you, say the word,” Dairine said to Darryl over her shoulder.

“No problem. What’s on?”

“The classics,” Kit said. “Roll it!”

Dairine brought up the 1951 A Christmas Carol first, and on this Filif was most intent. When the Ghost cried, “Business! Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business…!” Nita heard Filif murmur, “We could have made a wizard out of him with a little work.”

“Well, kind of late for that, the guy’s dead,” Carmela said. “But also, it’s fiction. He didn’t really exist.”

“But this came out of someone’s mind?” Filif said.

“Yes…”

“Then he exists. All that’s left is to determine now is how concretely…”

Nita grinned, not sure how to even start arguing about that. When that film was done, they took a break for more popcorn, and then Dairine cued up Scrooged. Filif laughed as hard as any of them at this, which surprised Nita a little. How much research has he been doing on us?… she wondered.

The end of that produced demands for fresh drinks and more popcorn and ice cream among the viewers. While these were being distributed, Dairine grabbed the remote. “Got one more for you,” she said, grinning.

Nita had seen that grin. Often it didn’t mean well. “Okay,” she said, “what have you got up your sleeve?”

Dairine began punching numbers into the remote. “Should I be concerned?” Kit said. “Is it going to suddenly start spouting some new language at me that I can’t cope with?”

“Not at all,” Dairine said, “not at all.” She concentrated on the numbers she was punching into the pad, and glanced over at Spot. “Is that right?” she said.

There wasn’t any answer that any of them could hear, but Dairine looked satisfied. “Go,” she said to the entertainment system.

Moments later, the strangest screeching, howling, whining noise was coming out of the speakers. Some of the guests stared at that and the bright swirling graphics that accompanied them. But Ronan’s head came right up at the sound, and his mouth fell open, and he turned a look on Dairine that was profoundly accusatory. “How did you—”

“You mean you can’t guess?” Dairine said, leaning back against the pillows with a smug expression.

A television theme possibly much more famous in the British Isles than in North America began to play, against more of that howling sound effect. “Okay now,” Ronan said, “this is just a wee bit illicit. This doesn’t even air for four more days! Whose server have you hacked?”

Dairine placed one hand on her heart and assumed an expression of wounded dignity. “Nobody’s! How can you suggest that I would ever do such a thing?”

“Just like this,” Ronan said, completely unapologetic. “You saw my lips moving, I assume. Pause that first, would you? Thanks, Spotty. So. How?”

If it was possible, Dairine’s expression got even smugger. “The Mobiles are working on a project to store all available data,” she said. “You know about that?”

“The way I heard it,” Ronan said, “it was a project to back up the entire available universe.” He shook his head. “Still not too sure about what you use for media.”

“Not my problem,” Dairine said. “That’s hardware. But since I’m the Mobiles’ mom, they’re particularly interested in backing up all the data on Earth, in case I should need something. They said they didn’t want me to be discommoded.” She smiled sweetly. “Nice of them. Anyway, it turns out that one of the systems they’ve been routinely backing up for me is the entire data storage system of the BBC. And somewhere in that data storage, surprise surprise, is the next Dr. Who Christmas special. I mean, seriously, you don’t think they keep it stored on tape or something, do you?” Dairine raised her eyebrows. “So once it’s backed up to the motherboard world—because they keep all the really important storage, by which I mean everything I’m interested in, backed up locally—it’s really simple for me, well, me and Spot, to run live streaming video from the Mobiles’ backup to here…”

Kit blinked. “Tell me,” he said, “that downloading however many gigs of data it takes to store a Christmas special from umpty billion light years away isn’t doing something really horrible to our broadband allowance.”

Dairine made an amused spluttering noise. “No,” she said.

“Wonderful,” Ronan said. “Now would you kindly fecking unpause this thing? I’m dying here.”

The display unpaused, and Ronan fell back against the cushions on the floor with an expression of complete fulfillment. “You may just have justified your entire reason for existence,” he said to Dairine, and fell silent.

Another hour went by full of time travel and excitement and danger, with a different version of A Christmas Carol and another version of Scrooge woven all through. At the end of it, Ronan looked around and remarked, “I wondered that he’d gone a little quiet.”

Nita followed Ronan’s glance and saw that the cushions among which Darryl had been lying were empty. “Guess it was getting a little late for him,” he said. He rolled over and looked up at Filif. “How about you, Fil? You holding up all right?”

“Oh yes,” Filif said. He rustled, shaking out his branches all around. “It takes some synthesis, all of this,” he said after a few moments. “The way the tales interleave, the way they reach back to the triggering event… It’s complex. And so are the strictly social aspects. I can see this subject will take a lot of study…” But he sounded cheerful about the prospect.

“Do you guys do anything like this at home?” Dairine said. “Is there a holiday time when everyone gets together?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kit said. “I saw something in the manual once. That sort of summer festival where everyone goes up into the mountains…”

“Well, yes. But this time of year… well, our version of this time of year,” Filif said, “there’s something else. Not to get together, though. To get away from everyone else.”

That brought a number of heads up. “What?” said Dairine, and “Hey, that’s one I could get used to,” said Ronan. “Especially if you had relatives like mine…” He rubbed his eyes.

“Sounds a little weird,” Nita said, “to want to get away from other people at a holiday.”

Filif rustled. “Maybe not so strange,” he said, “if you’ve heard the story behind it…”

“Story!!” shouted about half the room.

“Then listen now, and hear the wind in the branches,” Filif said, “and it will tell you the tale of the Outlier, who made us what we are…”

Everyone got quiet.

Filif was quiet too. “The organism from which my people came,” he said, “one of the original species of Demisiv vegetation, arose something like five hundred million years ago as you reckon time. As far as we can tell from our own investigations, it started very small, in a near-equatorial zone mostly surrounded by several of what were then the largest lakes on the planet. We were really shrubs then—” and his berries went pink with amusement at Carmela. “Just low scrubby frondy things, like your earliest gymnosperms.